Newtown to Nashville: The Whitlams’ Tim Freedman takes a surprise detour

MUSIC
The Whitlams Black Stump
Factory Theatre, May 31
Reviewed by MICHAEL BAILEY
★★★★

Tim Freedman goes country? It’s a commercially prescient move for the Whitlams’ frontman, in a year when Beyoncé has made the banjo as hot as it’s ever been.

But this night proved the Whitlams Black Stump project, in which Freedman’s indie piano-pop gets the twang-and-pedal-steel treatment, also makes artistic sense. With his clear singing voice and narrative songwriting style, one could imagine Freedman going down almost as well in Tamworth as he did in front of the inner-west faithful – especially with the band he’d wrangled.

Tim Freedman’s detour into country suits his storytelling style. Credit: Damien Bennett

Rod McCormack on six-string duties has written more than 30 Australian country No.1s and his ear-catching, concise picking style showed how. Matt Fell on bass has a cupboard of Golden Guitar awards for production. He knows just when to lay out for a Freedman couplet to cut through or peel off a big boom to cry alongside Oliver Thorpe’s pedal steel.

Drummer Terepai Richmond – a Whitlam of 25 years’ standing – struck an intriguing balance between Nashville and Newtown, although it was clear that Freedman, with his crumpled suit, wry observations and jazzy piano fills, would always spiritually belong to the latter. Never mind that one of his new songs is a bush ballad about Ned Kelly’s sister.

What was different was Freedman’s emphasis on the storytelling so intrinsic to the country genre. The tempos and the keys were generally lowered, allowing the 59-year-old to croon new meaning into Whitlams stalwarts such as No Aphrodisiac, given a banjo-led Hotel California vibe for extra yearning; Blow up the Pokies wallowing in pedal-steel misery; or a Tex-Mex arrangement of You Sound Like Louis Burdett that found the joy at its heart.

Freedman’s championing of other Sydney storytellers was a feature of this year’s Whitlams Black Stump album Kookaburra, so we got cracking covers of Perry Keyes’ The Day John Sattler Broke His Jaw and Bernie Hayes’ Your Boyfriend’s Back in Town, Freedman not above miming a few actions to get their stories across.

Whitlams classics work well with a country makeover. Credit: Damien Bennett

This reduced level of irony – hey, maybe Freedman has gone a bit Nashville – extended to a gorgeous, revelatory cover of New World in the Morning by the perennially uncool Roger Whittaker, and a dusting-off of Grateful Dead’s Friend of the Devil, its shared leads marking out Thorpe as a great singer and fiery electric guitarist.

Pastoral sounds suited recent single Man About a Dog and new Perry Keyes co-write Fallen Leaves (“17 chords and the truth” quipped Freeman) , but were superfluous on new material like the uproarious 50 Again and big-chorused Last Life, both urban pop at heart.

But Thorpe’s pedal steel helped reinvent the Whitlams’ two greatest ballads, Charlie No.2 and its sequel Keep the Light on, that weeping volume swell and Freedman’s heartfelt singing minting a couple of country barroom classics.

---

VIVID LIVE
Underworld
Opera House Concert Hall, May 30
Also May 31 and June 1
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★★

Pity the poor punter expecting Underworld’s New Romantic Underneath the Radar incarnation. Pity even more anyone taking a pass on the basis of (misunderstood) Trainspotting laddishness or having heard their oeuvre only on Spotify. Underworld recordings might as well be pan-pipe covers of the Disney songbook for all the resemblance they bear to this live show.

A pure, endogenous ecstasy flows from the thrill of seeing the counterculture heroes feted in Sydney’s grandest venue, its acoustic perfection matched to the tight technical precision of Rick Smith’s machines if the 2500 laser-lit smiles are anything to go by.

The band repeatedly build up, barrage and then bliss out the audience.Credit: Jordan Munns

Over the course of 2½ hours the band repeatedly build up, barrage and then bliss out the audience. Sure, it is a formula, and you might wonder what is actually “live” about an electronic techno-DJ set, but the genius is in Smith’s slight variations based on his reading of the crowd. In his hands the audience is an instrument played to perfection.

Karl Hyde is also very live and equally important. Often a mere shadow in the billowing smoke, his lyrics give a propulsive hook to the performance, even while his vocals undercut with a tinge of menace. When his figure does emerge he appears as a raver GIF on endless loop. That he is the second Hyde to grace the Concert Hall stage this year – daughter Tyler was here with Black Country, New Road a few months ago – should forgive the dated choreography.

The overall effect is to transform a venue more suited to Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice into a summer’s night field in ’90s Essex. The only concession to old age is a jarring intermission that rips us back to the sights of our Vivid harbour. It takes a while for the second half to rebuild the Romford vibe but when it does – ending inevitably on the magnificent crescendo of Born Slippy .NUXX – Underworld could even teach Orpheus a thing or two.

---

Dido and Aeneas. Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall. May 30
Also June 2,3
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Still, statuesque and every inch a queen, Valda Wilson as Dido stood centre stage in white while Kanen Breen, the gilt-clad Sorceress, cackled convulsively about why we hate her. Beautiful, courageous, successful and unbound, and worst of all a refugee, his only recourse is to wound her through love.

As preface to Pinchgut Opera’s quietly glowing performance of Purcell’s masterpiece, written over 330 years ago as no more than a school play, Kate Mulvany has created a prologue that places Naham Tate’s naively charming rhymes in the original text within a context of epic fatefulness where malevolence destroys hope and shapes nations.

It was a bold move to ask an audience that had come to hear Purcell’s buoyant melodic gems to listen to a whispered, croaking contextualisation of the story against atonal noise from the orchestra. But it worked, not least because of Breen’s mesmerising hyperactivity of body and voice which would upstage the Angel of Judgement if ever he is given the chance.

Wilson sang Dido with a strong, rich sound full of colour, more in the Janet Baker than the Emma Kirkby tradition but with youthful poise all her own. She began her concluding lament with unassuming stillness and a lower register of rewarding tensile strength, opening out to an upper range of blossoming crimsons and velvety smoothness.

As loyal servant Belinda, Sara Macliver sang with fluidly polished finish and comely graciousness of line. David Greco’s Aeneas had a honed pointed edge and a tone of tarnished wiriness, combined with a persuasive persona which, while not quite conceding he is a cad, is at least willing to be sheepish about his own entitlement.

Many of the glories of this performance came from the ensemble (Lana Kains, Michelle Ryan, Stephanie Dillon, Olivia Payne, Louis Hurley, Andrew O’Connor, Jack Jordan and Freddy Shaw) who sculpted the crispness of Purcell’s rhythms to perfection, moved amiably to Shannon Burn’s unpretentious bucolic choreography and tapered the final chorus down to a radiant whisper of bereft sadness.

Kains’ solos created bright arabesques of line, while the witches’ duos by Ryan and Payne were etched with vivacious precision. Pinchgut’s trademark is to make musically sophisticated, joyous engaging theatre on a shoestring, and director Lucy Clements, designer Jeremy Allen and lighting designer Morgan Moroney have created a distinctive look and feel of austere beauty tinged with strangeness.

The Orchestra of the Antipodes mixed with the vocal fabric discreetly, producing surprising colours and frisky rhythms from guitar, flute and percussion over an underlying bed of string warmth.

Conductor Erin Helyard shaded and shaped the contours of voices and instruments with discerning subtlety and judicious metric pace, creating a tonal palette of delicate beauty that preserved reverence and wonder at the freshness of Purcell’s ideas over centuries.

THEATRE
NEVER CLOSER
Belvoir St Theatre, May 29
Until June 16
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Do we let hate go, or cling to it, and let it define us? Wars breed resentments that last decades. Those spawned by occupations last for generations and are renewed by each fresh atrocity and its reciprocation, as we witness in Palestine/Israel. Most First Nations peoples arrive at an accommodation of sorts, ideally via a treaty. Even Ireland more or less resolved what they called, with heroic understatement, The Troubles.

Grace Chapple is a Northern Irish Australian, and her play is set in a little town near the Irish border, firstly during the full furnace of The Troubles, and then a decade later. She blesses her play with six characters who between them have sufficient warmth almost to lift the constant mizzle and the mist, and she comes at the political and religious antagonisms obliquely.

Instead, Chapple steeps her characters in The Troubles, and then watches them interact, whether as friends, lovers, firebrands or drunks. She wants to show us people coping and not coping – mostly the latter. When they do cope, it’s largely thanks to the warm inner glow provided by God’s compensation: Irish whiskey.

Slainte! The drinking in the play is epic.Credit: Brett Boardman

The play pivots around Deidre (Emma Diaz) and her inner circle, firstly when they’re dreaming of their futures, and then later, when most of those futures have gone astray, as futures tend to do. Deidre wants to be a writer, Jimmy (Raj Labade) wants to be a singer, Niamh (Mabel Li) wants to be a doctor and Mary (Ariadne Sgouros) yearns to move to New York. Conor (Adam Sollis) has cloudier ambitions, beyond seeing the bottom of his next glass, and winning an unwinnable war.

There’s small-town friction between the women over gaining the available men, and when we meet them a decade on, Niamh, now a psychiatrist in London, returns with her new fiance, Harry (Philip Lynch). Being an English prosecuting barrister, he’s about as welcome as a plucked duck at a vegan barbecue.

These people are epic drinkers, and Harry, finding himself rather out of his depth, soon finds the contents of his stomach out of his mouth. Sympathy for him is thinner on the ground than sick after 800 years of English occupation, not helped by Harry’s Anglicanism amid a group that goes to mass almost as often as it opens a bottle. Almost.

Sgouros makes Mary Chapple’s key creation. She struts, swears and swaggers while drinking like there’s a prize to be won. Perhaps there is. She also has a scythe-like wit, and Sgouros times the pauses in her lines like a virtuoso woodwind player. Without her, the play might not beckon us in as successfully.

Directed by Hannah Goodwin, it’s among the rare works to graduate from the Downstairs theatre to the main stage. Initially, it moves at the patience-testing pace with which a pint of tap-poured Guinness settles, and then it accelerates – perhaps too fast. I rather liked the initial sluggish pace and incremental learning about these people. Later it starts to feel its neatly ticking plot line boxes from the playwrights’ handbook.

Harry, the classic outsider, is obviously a source of humour, but this potential wears thin, and Lynch struggles to sustain the intended accent. Goodwin blocks too many scenes as clear-cut confrontations, with one character facing off against the others, and the ending and its coda feel contrived. Essentially, the text, directing, acting and design are good, but all effective art contains its own kernel of truth: the trick is adhering to it. Chapple’s lets hers slip away, just a little.